If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, I Programmer Weekly is a digest of book reviews, articles and news written by programmers, for programmers. This one covers November 1st to 7th

This Week's Book Reviews

SQL and Relational Theory - Database legend, Joe Celko, writes about another, Chris Date. This is more than a book review, it's part history, part theory, and a thoroughly interesting read.

It is 5 years since the Open Handset Alliance announced the Android platform and, despite all the problems of fragmentation, Android's 75% of the market vindicates Google's decision to make Android an open platform.

On November 4, 1952 UNIVAC became an overnight TV star when it correctly predicted the outcome of the US presidential elections, proving the pundits wrong. The headlines the next day read "Machine Makes Monkey Out of Man".

How close are we to having household robots capable of the basic domestic chores that would make them really useful? The latest in Korean robotics technology suggests we are getting there - but slowly.

Quadrotors do some impressive things, but so far they haven't managed the trick of flying free and avoiding obstacles. Now we have a quadrotor that can do just this and using only a standard video camera.

IBM and its partners are working to make sure the lights stay on when storms hit. Big Blue is using predictive analytics and hyper-local weather predictions to help electricity companies keep supplies working, no matter how bad the storms are.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge is intended to push the boundaries of what robots can do. Even if you don't want to compete, you can try your own solution using the GFE simulator which is now available for download.

The Core

Knowing which way is up is often useful. The HTML Device Orientation API now provides a standard way for your apps to find out which way they are pointing - and the good news is that it really is almost standard.

eBooks

In this chapter of Modern Java we get to grips with the idea of a container that is used to host components to build a user interface. We also find out how the Swing GUI Builder generates code to make it all much easier.